Guitarricadelafuente: “Today music is so produced and disguised that finding something pure is almost a miracle

The Valencian Álvaro Lafuente vindicates his sources when he recalls the summers he spent in the ancestral family home in the Teruel village of Cuevas de Cañart.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
15 August 2022 Monday 01:10
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Guitarricadelafuente: “Today music is so produced and disguised that finding something pure is almost a miracle

The Valencian Álvaro Lafuente vindicates his sources when he recalls the summers he spent in the ancestral family home in the Teruel village of Cuevas de Cañart. Starting with his artistic name, Guitarricadelafuente. There he experienced first-hand the traditional music that years later is one of the roots of his fascinating musical proposal.

Lafuente (Benicàssim, 1997) began to learn to play the guitar in a self-taught way on YouTube; After a while, songs like Catalina , Guantanamera or Agua y mezcal were uploaded with millions of reproductions... the multinational Sony signed him, last May he published his first album, La cantera , produced by Refree ( Sílvia Pérez Cruz, Kiko Poison, Child of Elche, Rosalía). And now he is touring it, with stops today at the Porta Ferrada Festival (10 pm) and tomorrow at the Cerdanya Music Festival (9 pm).

La Vanguardia subscribers have a 15% discount on Porta Ferrada tickets and also on Cerdanya Music Fest tickets, as long as they buy them at Vanguardia Tickets.

Why an album in times of non-stop singles?

Releasing an album implies a longer process and possibly that you go a long time without presenting music, which is what has happened to me. However, it is something that I wanted to do to give a vision that represented me and that I felt comfortable with. On the other hand, all the scenarios and concepts that have been brought together in this album draw from both folklore and contemporary music, even the most urban music. We traveled to different geographical points thanks to Latin American folklore, to that of all the regions of Spain, to the Mediterranean... And all this converges in one point, Cuevas de Cañart, which is my town, where I began to discover music almost innate

The album is produced by Raúl Fernández Refree. How did you meet him?

I think it was through Paco, Niño de Elche, after the summer of 2019. I showed him the few songs I had written for the album, and from that moment I think we understood each other and got to work in Barcelona. When I had the opportunity to work with him, I did it head on. I knew him for the six years he was working with Sílvia [Pérez Cruz], obviously because of Los Angeles and also because one day I heard a song by Salvador Sobral with Luisa Sobral that I loved and I started to see the credits and saw that he had produced it Raul.

Did you have any idea how you wanted it to sound?

The idea I had for my first album was that above all it would be a record of songs for guitar and voice. Something tending to the traditional but simpler. We started working with From the Heights, which was the first recorded with him, and which in theory was going to be on the album. Then the pandemic came, everything slowed down, new ideas came, new songs, and everything went somewhere else. After the confinement in which I recorded things for him, I decided to come here to Barcelona to work face to face and in this sense it ended up being a very comfortable way of doing it, like living with the project, with the process, without hurry and looking for the best solution to each song.

After working with him, what would you say would qualify as Raül's touch?

I think he has incredible sensitivity and impeccable taste. And seeing the projects he has worked on, I think he takes the sensitivity of the artist and elevates it to another place, a place that perhaps he would not have headed for. That is, he leaves his mark extolling each project.

How was the current album presentation tour planned?

I hadn't played for two years due to the pandemic and I was somewhat afraid to see how people would react since we are taking it both indoors and outdoors. We're going as a quintet, and I think the result is very good, because the format is very acoustic with traditional musical elements but they are processed differently for each song. There are many pre-recorded elements because it is the only way to translate the nuances of the recording live.

His rise has been dizzying, don't you think?

I was born in '98. When I was 19 I started making music at home, I was studying architecture in Valencia at the time and uploaded songs. It was a very quick process because right away I started doing concerts and festivals. This music thing has become much more democratized, not only can you make yourself known more easily and you don't need promoters or record companies, apart from the fact that young people now have much more access to media, so they have an easier time recording in home your computer, cook it and eat it.

But you have ended up signing with a multinational.

When we finished the album with Refree in July 2021, that's when I decided to take it to another level. We did it and we recorded it without any label. I spent quite a bit of time working independently.

This career marked by the vertiginous, doesn't it lead you to be precisely more cautious?

As my attitude has always been that of not expecting anything professionally, everything that has come to me has been like a gift... that's why I think the best attitude is not to expect anything in return for nothing. Not having expectations is how you will be more comfortable.

Does your boom coincide with the fact that folk has become a bit of a fashion genre?

I think so, that there is something like a rebirth, because otherwise it would have been impossible to make an album like this and also with a multinational company like Sony. For me, this record wants to convey a longing for the genuine and the traditional or whatever makes you feel at home. And it is that now we turn to the bar of all life, to the food of all life, to the town, because having had so much amalgamation of information and different references, a very fluid generation has been created, with many different styles and without a very clear identity. Somehow, including me, we have to live what we have never had, to which we must add that now we have more access to old files, and in the end each person who has some kind of concern can look for a type of music which was difficult before. We have a more placed taste in the old or traditional. And for me, this album La cantera represents this impetus to keep an eye on the past in order to contextualize it in the present.

But what quarry is he talking about?

The quarry is all those future generations that go to the past, rescue those stories that their grandparents have told them, their experiences... and pass them on to the next quarry. Like a continuous cycle. That is why I think that there is always a current academy. It's like a generational change in everything. And it is about keeping an eye on the past to collect its teachings. I also think that today's pop songs that talk about the girl who met the boy in the subway is the same as the girl who went to fetch water from the fountain and found the boy under the olive tree, so to speak. something. Who says that these songs from La cantera can't be the folk of the future. In this sense, the disk also means an umbilical cord that goes from the past to the future.

This recovery of folk as a style can also mean that there is currently a very majority of styles and music in the tastes of young people, urban, Latin, synthesized...

It is not so much that there is a saturation but rather that everything sounds the same. I think that in the end there is much more variety in what we have behind than in what is in the present, and more interesting and enriching. Nowadays everything is so produced and so disguised that finding something pure is something exceptional, almost a miracle.

One of his references in Manu Chao.

The first time I heard it was typical, going by car on a trip with my parents or my uncles and it sounded Clandestino, of course. What I like the most in the first place is that you have a very large imaginary where many influences are grouped and very different from Latin America or Africa. I like the colors of their music but above all the truth and simplicity of the reasons for their songs: I see a genuine truth. Aside from vindicating his music, of course.

And forced: why Guitarricadelafuente?

When I created this name for myself it was the time when I was looking for gigs, I hung up my songs, and it was one night that I took it out: guitarrita for the Aragonese guitar, and lafuente for my last name. It has to do with the connection where it came from and in the end it seems to me that it is very representative of where I come from and how everything has grown.